Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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H.A. Drake’s Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Ancient Society and History) is a remarkable piece of work. One of his opening moves is to show how, despite clear and overt differences, both Burckhardt’s pure-political Constantine and Baynes’s sincere-Christian Constantine share common assumptions about politics and religion. He…
Niebuhr has this nice harmonization of the Matthean and Lukan beatitude to the poor: “Both versions are necessary to catch the full flavor of the beatitude. For the Lukan version alone would make poverty a guarantee of virtue, particularly of the virtue of humility, which it is not. The Matthean…
Niebuhr claims that irony is inherent in the Christian view of history: Christianity’s “interpretation of the nature of evil in human history is consistently ironic. This consistency is achieved on the basis of the belief that the whole drama of human history is under the scrutiny of a divine judge…
Niebuhr ( Irony ) quotes an unnamed European statesman who expresses gratitude for America’s help in resisting tyranny, but fear “that we might become an American ally.” America’s idealism doesn’t reassure him: “The idealism does indeed prevent America from a gross abuse of its power. But it might well accentuate…
Charles Maier’s comparative study Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors reaches the waffly but accurate conclusion that the “United States reveals many, but not all - at least not yet - of the traits that distinguished empires.” Early on, he makes the helpful distinction between “being” and “having” an…
Van Dam ( Roman Revolution of Constantine ) suggests that Eusebius’s Life was simultaneously a political tract celebrating the elevation of a Christian emperor and a theological apology promoting Eusebius’s Christological subordinationism. The afterlife of Eusebius’s treatise, though, put the emperors in their place. Rufinus’s translation/paraphrase of Eusebius’s Church History…
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